A Control-Theoretical System for Modulating Hippocampal Gamma Oscillations Using Stimulation of the Posterior Cingulate Cortex

Closed-loop stimulation for targeted modulation of brain signals has emerged as a promising strategy for episodic memory restoration. In parallel, closed-loop neuromodulation strategies have been applied to treat brain conditions including drug-resistant depression, Parkinson’s Disease, and epilepsy. In this study, we seek to apply control theoretical principles to achieve closed loop modulation of hippocampal oscillatory activity. We focus on hippocampal gamma power, a signal with an established association for episodic memory processing, which may be a promising ‘biomarker’ for the modulation of memory performance. To develop a closed-loop stimulation paradigm that effectively modulates hippocampal gamma power, we use a novel data-set in which open-loop stimulation was applied to the posterior cingulate cortex and hippocampal gamma power was recorded during the encoding of episodic memories. The dataset was used to design and evaluate a linear quadratic integral (LQI) servo-controller in order to determine its viability for in-vivo use. In our simulation framework, we demonstrate that applying an LQI servo controller based on an autoregressive with exogenous input (ARX) plant model achieves effective control of hippocampal gamma power in 15 out of 17 experimental subjects. We demonstrate that we are able to modulate gamma power using stimulation thresholds that are physiologically safe and on time scales that are reasonable for application in a clinical system. We outline further experimentation to test our proposed system and compare our findings to emerging closed-loop neuromodulation strategies.